The God of Mediocrity
by Rustam
Summary: [AMADEUS] A brief vignette describing Salieri's existence after the death of Mozart. Based loosely on the film.


6 December 1791 

This is the morning after the death of Amadeus. Yesterday morning, Salieri stood in the rain dressed in black, one of only a few mourners hovering like ravens by the city gates, watching the carriage clatter down the rutted path to the gravesite, where the swaddled body would be dropped as one upon many and covered with lime. Salieri returned from the funeral to his empty apartments, gazing at the rooms of a man who had become accustomed to the finer things in life. Each thing in its place, gilded and ornamental, yet silent, existing only to be used or enjoyed, never exulted in. His footsteps are like pistol shots. He wondered if, the next morning, he would simply wake up deaf. With the death of Mozart, perhaps Salieri's ability to delight in sound would die with him.

This morning he wakes up, blinks his eyes, and makes the curious discovery that his hearing is fine, yet in some vastly ironic twist, he has lost the capacity to see the world in color. However, as he rouses himself and embarks upon his daily routines, it becomes easier and easier to forget this loss, for the people around him are vague and colorless anyway. They are no great challenge to dominate, cajole, or manipulate into bending to his will. There is no longer any threat to his sense of his own artistic superiority, save for when he closes his eyes at night, and remembers the colors the world used to have. His position in the court of the tone-deaf Emperor is safe, not that it was ever really in jeopardy in the first place.

And yet, the world is a closed door. A door that had only been open briefly, perhaps not even visible to the man-child who had held it open for him. Perhaps Mozart's foot was inadvertently keeping the door open, while his attention was on something else. It was Salieri who stood at the threshold, the better able to gaze upon the light within, and the one who missed it the most when he himself had shut the door and dropped the latch.

As night fell, the sky a deeper black than he'd ever known, Salieri putters around his apartments in the flickering white light, then ends his day and goes to sleep.

This is the last time he actually notices the colorlessness of his world, until one day many years later when he gazes upon a vast shaggy mop of vividly brown hair. Now that's a curious sight. One of his students, an acerbic young man from Bonn, is grimly plunking away at the piano keys and fine-tuning his talent. Nothing comes from his mind perfectly formed, as it did with Mozart. It is only through his endless self-revision that beauty begins to emerge.

Salieri's student, unlike Mozart, is not a genius. He is a talented _artiste_. He knows what works, he knows how to make the crowd like it, and his music comes from the soul, rather than the abstract fountain of music pouring down from heaven that Mozart had the good fortune to be born under. He accomplishes what his teacher Salieri can only imagine. He can create the sublime, then understand and appreciate it, revel in its magnificence, and even see it in the music of others, when he cares to admit such a thing. He is Salieri and Mozart made one, at last. "Ludwig," says the old man, trying to repress tears, as he sees his first true color in decades. "You can never know how I envy you."

"Shut it, you old bastard," Beethoven barks, not looking up from his piano. "I was uff on zat last shcale. Again! Schnell!" He is also a horse's ass.

Of course Salieri sees color in another student as well. A lanky Hungarian who, for some reason, Salieri perceives entirely in shades of red. There is an edge to this man's smile. Music, to him, is a weapon. The enemy is _status quo_. He is chaotically neutral. If things go too well for his side, he simply switches sides. His name is Franz Liszt.

"Chaos is far more important than beauty, _maestro_," Liszt drawls, baring his teeth while patting his grey and withering teacher on the shoulder. "For what is more beautiful than chaos? The beauty in structure and form is an illusion of your vulgar senses." His teacher can see the black, gaping maw of the twentieth century in Liszt's death's-head smile.

Late in his life, Salieri sits in the open air, under the sky, and stares bewilderedly as the world is once again bathed in brilliant hue and shade. These colors, to him, are all wrong. Too bright. Too different. Too sharp. Bizarre, unfriendly. It is a mixed blessing, for the world is passing him by.


End file.
